The Billionaire Spectrum

Some flaunt it, some donate it.

I’ve been thinking lately about wealth. Not mine - I’m woefully short on acquaintance and familiarity with the subject, and that’s not going to change. But as I age, I ruminate, as many of you do, about what I would do with billions of dollars if I had accumulated such a pile. Some folks have those, and their plans say a lot about who they are.

Some billionaires appear to see their money as a way to compete with each other. Organizations like Forbes Magazine regularly publish a pecking order listing how billionaires rank among their peers in total wealth. It’s a subject for curiosity-seekers and magazine page-turners, and apparently that’s important to a certain type of billionaire.

I suppose it’s the same impetus that tempts them to decorate their homes in gold, for instance, or to spend outrageous sums on watches, haute couture fashion, collections of rare sports cars, and the like for themselves and their besties. If you got it, flaunt it.

Then there are the ones at the other end of the spectrum. They give it away.

Warren Buffett, the self-made investment guru and “Oracle of Omaha,” has an aversion to ostentation. He has an estimated net worth of $160.2 billion as of this past May, making him the fifth-richest person in the world. He would have much, much more had he not given many billions to worthwhile causes and organizations for decades.

Buffett has pledged to give away 99 percent of his fortune through philanthropy, with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation serving as a major conduit. The Gates group focuses on improving global health, education, and development, especially in countries where poverty runs high. Similar to Buffett, Bill Gates pledges to donate almost all his money to philanthropy within the next 20 years. He has already given away over $100 billion.

In 2010 Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett founded The Giving Pledge, a charitable organization whose wealthy members pledge to donate over half of their fortunes to charity either before or after their death. As of mid-2022 the pledge had 236 signatories, most of them billionaires, from 28 countries. Their pledges at that time totaled $600 billion.

The pledgers diverge widely in every respect. Some are politically liberal, others are conservative. Buffett is an agnostic, Bill Gates is a practicing Catholic. But they all see the good that their wealth can do in the world.

And that’s what sets them apart from the ostentatious and hoarding type of billionaire. They’ve been blessed with knowledge of the joy that comes from helping others.

You don’t have to be Christian to possess that knowledge, and to act on it. But it seems to me it’s hard to profess Christianity and not do for others with what you have.

Biblical Christianity makes no bones about it. When Jesus was asked by a rich young man what he must do to inherit eternal life, he was told to sell all he had and give to the poor. Jesus added that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter Heaven.

At the other end of the gospels’ economic spectrum is the parable of the widow’s mite, where Jesus praises the poor woman who gives all she has at the temple, compared to the rich who give just from their surplus.

Just as I’m far from an expert on wealth, I’m certainly not a Biblical scholar either. But I appreciate the wisdom of sportswriter-poet Grantland Rice’s famous 1917 poem, “When the One Great Scorer comes to mark against your name, he marks not that you won or lost, but how you played the game.”

Billionaires like Buffett, Bill and Melinda Gates know how to play the game, as do their colleagues in The Giving Pledge.